


Squall Line

by Kicker



Series: The Jetstream Has A Lot To Answer For [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, One Shot, Sexual Content, Smoking, Smut, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:42:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6297610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kicker/pseuds/Kicker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Storm's a-blowin' in," the settler had said, chewing on a stem of razorgrain. "Go on if you want, but I wouldn't want to be out in it. And I know this place."</p><p>When her eyes had narrowed at the suggestion that she didn't, Danse realised they'd end up caught in the middle of the biggest storm of the decade. He just hoped that they'd find some kind of shelter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Squall Line

The storm had been building for hours, a line of dark blue clouds on the horizon that had since grown to fill the whole southern sky. He'd seen nothing living for about as long a time; mirelurks all dug down into the soil, barely a curve of shell to show their presence. A half dozen molerats had swarmed right across their path a few hours ago, ignoring them entirely as they made for their burrows.

Not a good sign.

Just in the last half hour, the air pressure had plummeted, far enough for rarely-heard sounds to start coming from his suit's warning systems. Then the wind had started to rise. And carried on rising, soon becoming louder than the rolls of thunder that had been echoing around the hills since the morning.

"We're not going to make it," she says, tapping on the Pip-Boy, strands of hair whipping into her eyes. "It's coming on faster than I thought."

"Agreed," he says. "We should seek shelter."

Not for the first time, he's glad for his helmet, so he doesn't have to conceal his irritation. He had advised against them leaving the last settlement until the storm had passed, but she had insisted that there was time to reach their destination.

"My father was a geologist," she had said, confidently. "I spent every day of my childhood outside. I know how this place works. The storms always look worse than they are."

Things have changed, since she was a child.

A gust of wind sends dust and grit rattling noisily against his suit. She spins away from it, cursing, coughing, hands darting up to cover her eyes. She drops her pack to the ground, rummages in it to pull out a pair of goggles and a scarf, which she ties around her face as protection.

They keep moving. After a while, she turns to him. Anything she might have said was muffled by the scarf or whipped away by the wind, but she points off to the right of the path.

He looks in the direction she's pointing. A roof, that might have been hidden away if the trees surrounding it still had leaves, or even branches. It seems relatively intact, the windows covered by wooden shutters, no visible holes in the structure from this side at least. A lucky find. Another one, for her. A charmed soul.

Right then the rain starts to fall, landing heavy in the dirt, dark splashes as large as bottlecaps when they land straight down, stretching out sharp as blades when the wind blows.

She picks the lock, and cracks the door open gently, or tries to. The wind rips it from her hand, sends it crashing back into the cabin.

He sighs and readies his rifle, preparing for the inevitable swarm of ferals drawn by the sound. Drawn by her, as it often seems. Charmed in some ways, not in others.

Nothing comes.

Her shoulders rise and fall in a quick shrug, and she steps inside, pushing the goggles up onto the top of her head. She doesn't even draw her knife. There are two rooms to the back that she neglects to sweep before dropping her pack onto the floor, the clatter of salvage and ammo inside making enough noise to wake the dead.

Still, nothing comes.

The cabin is small, stuffy, but dry. There's a fireplace to the left, with a stack of firewood piled up on one side of it. A threadbare rug in front of it, a table pushed against the opposite wall with a few neatly-arranged chairs. She's already pulled out a fliplighter and is lighting a lamp that sits in the middle of the table. There are no other lights, no shelves, not even a simple couch. And the ceiling is low. Far too low. The top of his helmet scrapes against it, sending dustings of plaster down over his shoulders.

She's passing right by him to shut the door when it happens for about the sixth time since he stepped in. She coughs irritably. "Come on, Danse, get out of the damn suit before you bring the roof down."

He counts under his breath. It's alright. The storm will pass, and they will leave. He won't have to put up with her for long. He faces into a corner, and hits the release on his suit. He steps down from it, closes it up again. At least with just the two of them he doesn't have to remove the core to stop people messing with it.

Probably.

On the ground, he turns to find her watching him. "What is it, Knight?" he asks.

She replies with nothing more than a brief lift of an eyebrow. She grabs one of the chairs, steps past him to prop it under the doorhandle. She pulls out another chair from the table, angles it to face the unlit fire.

"Do sit," she says politely, gesturing at it.

He does, resting his hands in his lap. He listens to the storm rising outside, wind blowing noisily across the chimney, rain gusting against the shutters hard enough that it sounds like a shower of stones. There's a dripping sound, which he hopes isn't from inside the cabin.

She kicks off her shoes, as she always does at the first opportunity. Her socks are red, mostly. One of them has scorch marks over the top of the foot, and both of them are threadbare over her heels. She takes a few pieces of wood from the pile, and kneels to arrange them in the fireplace. Moments later, it seems, flames are flickering up and taking hold.

Never trust a woman who's good with fire. He couldn't remember who'd told him that, someone back in Rivet City maybe. But it came back to him every time she lit a campfire, every time she threw a molotov, every time she looked deep into an oil lamp as though she were reading something in the flames.

She stands, watches the fire for a moment, then pads silently away, leaning her head into the two adjoining rooms. She disappears into one of them. A few bangs echo out, a scraping sound, then something like splintering wood and a cry of victory.

She reappears with four unusually-shaped bottles slung from between her fingers. She pulls them open, one after another, sniffing and replacing the corks quickly. "Whiskey or... I don't even know what this is." She reopens it and sniffs again. "It might be brandy. Cherry brandy. It is cherry brandy. Holy shit. This smells delicious."

He shouldn't have to remind her. But for about the twenty-third time since they met, he does. "We are on a mission, Knight. It is against..."

"Yeah, yeah, protocol, regulations, whatever." She rolls her eyes and places one of the bottles in front of him. "For that, you get the whiskey. I doubt you'd appreciate the brandy as much as I will anyway."

"Knight," he says, pushing the bottle away. "We are on duty."

"No we're not," she says, uncorking her bottle, looking him right in the eye as she takes a sip. "It's out of hours. Drinking is fine."

"And what is the time, Knight?" he says, irritably.

She keeps staring, her lips twitching to hide a smile. Ineffectively. With a quick move, she unhooks the Pip-Boy from her wrist, and drops it into her pack. "No idea," she says, twisting on her seat to push the pack under the table.

So he can get in his suit, or crawl on the floor if he wants to find out.

He counts under his breath. The anger doesn't die down.

Fine.

He reaches out for the bottle.

She leans back against the back of her seat, closing her eyes and groaning. "We're going to be stuck here for days," she says.

"Think yourself lucky," he says, darkly. "I'm going to be stuck here with you."

"Oh," she says. "Don't hold back, Danse, tell me how you really feel."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't have said that."

"No," she says, turning to face him, leaning an elbow on the table, her chin on her hand. "That's good. I like to know where I stand. Any more home truths for me?"

He shakes his head. He definitely should not have said anything.

"Really," she says. "Come on, just one. Let it out, I can see you want to."

"I find working with you to sometimes be frustrating," he says. Annoyed, he reaches out for the bottle again.

She snorts with laughter. "Very mildly stated, well done. My turn. I find communicating with you to very often be frustrating."

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"Because your face," she says, waving her free hand towards it, "says more than your words do."

"It does?" he says, trying not to move his face.

"Yes," she says, pointing directly at him. "And that is exactly what I'm talking about. You said two words. Your face said about fifty, most of them being 'I am sick to death of you, Knight' which is fine, really, I completely understand, I'm annoying when I'm stressed, and I'm stressed all the god-damned time."

"I don't understand," he says.

She gestures over at his suit, dark and silent in the corner. "When you're in that, it's fine. You give the order, I do the thing. Well, sometimes. Then you take off the helmet, there's this little circle of face that I don't know how to deal with."

"Circle?" he asks, bewildered.

"It's the hood," she says, making a circle of her fingers, pressing them against her face. "I don't know, it seems to concentrate the facial expressions."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says.

"Neither do I," she says, taking a sip of her drink, turning away. She shakes her head a little. "Forget it."

He focuses his attention on the fire, the dry wood flaring up brightly now, shedding orange light through the room. It flickers and shudders as the wind moves outside. As the outside moves outside. Something out there bangs, repeatedly, a piece of fence, a branch against a wall, until it doesn't any more. Sounds almost like the world is falling apart. Again.

"You know, I've never even seen what's under that hood," she says, idly twisting the bottle in her hands. "Not on the Prydwen, not in Diamond City, not even at the Station after I laid you out."

She brings that up. Again. He'd walked out into the courtyard in Cambridge only to receive some sort of projectile to the side of his head. He'd come to to find her face looking down at him.

"Shit," she'd said. "Are you okay?"

He'd sat up. She was holding a leather ball in one hand, resting the other on his shoulder to stop him moving too far. That was the first time she'd ever touched him, and it came after knocking him out with a baseball.

"Woah," she'd said, "take it easy. Sorry, I was demonstrating a couple of pitching techniques to the Knight here, wasn't expecting you to burst out of the door like that."

The headache had lasted hours, the bruise for days. And no, he had not removed his hood, not even to let Haylen look at it.

"No, you haven't," he says, tipping another shot down his throat. And you're as likely to as I am to see what's under that jacket, he adds, silently.

At least, he intended it to be silent.

She keeps looking down at her hands, but her cheek twitches into a smile. Then she stands, and circles around the end of the table to stop just in front of him. She reaches out her hands, pulls the hood away from under his chin and over his head, and drops it on the table.

He lets her do it. He looks up at her as she runs her fingers through his hair. He’s not sure how to react. He knows how he's _supposed_ to react. She's one of his soldiers, his charge, so he should reprimand her. But her fingertips are brushing so gently over his scalp, and it feels so good that when they stop, he wants to tell her to put them back.

She stands back, silhouetted against the fire. She shrugs the jacket off her shoulders, drops it on the rug. Then she draws her shirt over her head, drops that on top of the jacket.

"Deal's a deal, right?" she says.

He grabs the bottle, takes another shot, like a fool. Points out she's still wearing a bra, like an asshole. Like he's still the kid in Rivet City with nothing to lose.

"Oh," she says. "You drive a hard bargain."

He averts his eyes, the spell broken. "Under the jacket, is all I said," he finds himself saying, backstepping. "The line's yours to draw."

A sudden movement, and she’s astride his lap, thighs pressing around his hips, her fingers grabbing his chin to force him to look at her.

"Under the hood, is all _I_ said." She sits back, makes sure he sees her eyes sweep over his entire body. "Where were you thinking of drawing the line?"

He just looks at her. It's all he can do.

Her weight is gone from his lap, but instead of turning away, back toward her chair, back toward her bottle of brandy, she’s pressing his thighs apart and kneeling between them. She’s curling a finger through the lower fastenings of his flightsuit, and he barely has a chance to realise his arousal before she's face-to-face with it.

"Oh," she says, running her thumb along its length.

He exhales in surprise, and perhaps not as quietly as he thinks, as her eyes flash up at him. She leans in, follows the track of her thumb with a warm, soft tongue. She swallows him whole, eats him alive, only lets him go when he’s empty and blind and cursing.

He finds his fingers buried in her hair as hard as hers are into his thigh. While he recovers his senses, she leans back on her haunches, rinsing her mouth with the brandy, brushing her hair back behind her ears.

He can’t move. He has no words. He has no way to express the hunger that she’s unleashed. Everything he’s repressed and hidden away, every time he's wanted to lash out in irritation or mistrust, all has come unravelled between her lips, so red against her pale skin. He wants more. He wants her. He's always wanted her, since the moment she strolled into Cambridge with that damned dog.

Now she’s watching him, balancing one hand on the neck of the bottle, the other draped over her knee. If she’s waiting for him to speak, he doesn’t know what to say. If she's waiting for him to move... he can't.

She turns away, finds her jacket, pulls a pack of cigarettes from a pocket. Flips it open and offers it to him.

He just about manages to shake his head.

She pulls one out and lights up. She smokes, walks around, checks the windows. Looks over her shoulder at him, once, twice, before kneeling to stub the spent cigarette out on the hearthstone. Then she gets back up to her feet, tall and graceful, pants slung low over her hips. Turns to face him.

So what now, she says, silently.

He holds out his hand to her.

She takes it. Settles down on his lap again, and now she kisses him, a strong, assertive kiss that tastes of smoke, alcohol, and himself. He runs his hands down her sides, around her waist, pulls her hips close against his.

Fuck. He has to have her.

She’s unbuckling, unzipping, pushing the flightsuit over his shoulders. She's running fingertips down his chest with an appreciative sigh.

He’s pushing her to the floor, in front of the fire, stripping the pants from her legs, running his hands up her thighs, a network of scars and fading bruises under his fingertips. He’s about to bury his face between her legs when she grabs his chin and pulls him up, his face to hers, his chest to hers, and wraps her legs around his waist.

He’s not ready, he's sure he's not ready, but she takes him into her hand in just the right way, and bites his neck in just the right way, and rocks her hips against him in just the right way, and in the course of all that rightness he finds himself just inside her, and maybe he is ready after all.

"C'mon," she says, and pulls him in deep.

She doesn’t work with him, like the other women he’s known. He thrusts, they thrust to meet him, everyone’s happy. Not her. She doesn’t follow his rhythm, she makes her own. He has to slow, and wait, and work out what she needs.

It's worth it when they're matched, perfectly, and she's bringing him deep, and she’s turning the air blue, when she's telling him this what she wants, it's what she's always wanted, right since she walked into Cambridge. She's holding him so close he can feel her heart racing. Her body is shuddering, she’s laughing, she cries out two, three times, and it’s over.

"Fuck," she says, and drops back on the floorboards. Her legs are still wrapped around him, and he’s still inside her. He shifts, slightly, to relieve the pressure on his knees, and she shudders again.

"Fuck," she repeats. He pulls away, and he thinks - hopes - that that’s a sigh of reluctance as she lets him go.

They lie side by side on the floor, like two soldiers trying to sleep under the stars. Except they’re both mostly naked, and he’s still hard. She sits up, leans across his chest, reaching for the bottle of brandy. She drinks from it, a delicate sip, and encourages him to sit up a little.

He props himself up on his elbows, allows her to pour some into his mouth, and encourages her to follow it up with a kiss.

"Once we’re out of this cabin," she says, "I understand if it has to be that this never happened." She looks at him, a good long up-and-down. "While we’re stuck here, though..."

"We make the most of it," he says, and pulls her onto him.


End file.
